Japan and the pastUndigested history

MANY asleep in Tokyo did not hear the rumble of the American B-29 bombers. By the time his father shook him awake, Katsumoto Saotome’s neighbourhood in Tokyo’s lower town was in flames. Canals were no escape, for the jellied paraffin in the bombs turned water into fire. Once it stuck to you, he says, flesh kept on burning, “right down to the bone”.

Mr Saotome, now 83, is about to mark the anniversary of Tokyo’s firebombing in 1945. In the single night of March 9th-10th, about 100,000 people were killed. With many men away at the war (which was going disastrously), most of the victims were women, children and the old.

The level of casualties that night was somewhat less than from the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on August 6th 1945, but greater than from the nuclear bomb dropped on Nagasaki three days later. Nor was the firebombing confined to the capital. Between November 1944 and August 1945, nearly 70 cities were reduced to rubble and perhaps 300,000, mostly civilians, were killed—a far more devastating campaign than any that took place in Europe (see table).

But if the British bombing of Dresden a month earlier than Tokyo produced a ripple of public concern in Europe, there was little Allied revulsion over the targeted killing of Japanese civilians on an unprecedented scale. Even today, the firebombings go oddly unremarked. The 70th anniversary of Dresden was commemorated across Europe in February. In Tokyo, however, there is not even a publicly funded museum to commemorate its firestorm, and only a modest number of people are expected to mark the anniversary alongside Mr Saotome. Official attempts to document who died began only in 2009 and remain incomplete, although a memorial in a corner of Yokoamicho park bears witness to the dead, next to a charnel house with the mixed ashes of thousands who died. (The park also commemorates those who died in Tokyo’s devastating earthquake and fire in 1923.)

After the war, the capital lacked the emotional and financial resources properly to mourn the victims, says Bret Fisk, a novelist who has written about the 1945 raids. Nor was there appetite to take issue with America, Japan’s new cold-war ally. A museum project got bogged down in the 1990s. Conservatives said the plans, including descriptions of war crimes, were unpatriotic and “masochistic”.

If the suffering of civilians is difficult to acknowledge, it is harder still for Japan’s nationalists to accept the atrocities inflicted by the imperial Japanese army across Asia. A custom is now established for each sitting prime minister to issue a statement about the war on every tenth anniversary of Japan’s defeat, which is commemorated on August 15th. In 1995 Tomiichi Murayama, a Socialist prime minister, went furthest. He expressed “deep remorse” for Japan’s “colonial rule and aggression”. In 2005 Junichiro Koizumi, a nationalist from the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) that has ruled for most of the post-war period, repeated key phrases from the Murayama statement almost word-for-word.

What Shinzo Abe, the current prime minister, will say on the 70th anniversary is now a topic of much speculation. Mr Abe presumably knows what he thinks. In the past he has queried the definition of Japanese aggression, criticised the victors’ justice of the Tokyo war-crimes tribunal, and questioned the contents of an apology offered in 1993 by the then chief cabinet secretary, Yohei Kono, to “comfort women” coerced into sex with imperial army soldiers. Yet he has now formed a committee of sensible-minded historians, journalists and others for advice. The panel met for the first time on February 25th.

A consensus exists among many Japanese politicians, not to mention Japan’s friends in Washington, that Mr Abe must unambiguously repeat his predecessors’ expressions of remorse. China and South Korea will be watching closely for changes. Mr Abe has said that he will uphold “as a whole” the Murayama statement. Yet recent signs suggest that crucial phrases on Japan and the war may be altered.

Mr Abe certainly wants to emphasise Japan’s model post-war record of promoting peace and prosperity, and how it will continue. Yet as a senior LDP politician urged last month, the surest way for the prime minister to highlight Japan’s promising future would be to inherit without evasion previous statements on the past.

This article appeared in the Asia section of the print edition under the headline "Undigested history"